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If you love a veteran, get vaccinated.
They risked everything for the safety of their fellow Americans. Surely you can get a little shot.
It’s Veterans Day, and I am thinking about all the Americans who have served their country, risking or giving their lives to serve the interests of our nation. I’m thinking also of foreign nationals, like the thousands of Iraqi translators, who risked their safety to serve the U.S. Military — they may not have enlisted with our veterans, but they deserve much of the same credit and recognition for their actions.
But most of all this Veterans Day, I’m thinking about people who served their nation bravely as draftees. Because many veterans of U.S. wars did not serve by choice. Roughly 1/3 of Americans who served in Vietnam were drafted. More than half of U.S. soldiers in the Korean war were draftees, and of those who served on the battlefields of World War II, more than 6 in 10 were drafted.
The draft is on my mind because we live in an era when the nation faces another kind of existential threat. In response, our government has acted to conscript Americans not into military service, but into mandatory vaccination. Surprisingly, many Americans not only refuse to consent to vaccination, but argue it is beyond the scope of government authority to mandate vaccines.
